God's in His heaven, all's wrong with the world

Three Arab countries have banned the Hollywood film "Noah" on religious grounds even before its worldwide premiere and several others are expected to follow suit, a representative of Paramount Pictures told Reuters on Saturday.

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The new “Noah” sailed onto the silver screen last weekend, and thus far the storm has not subsided, with a whole host of good Christians finding the film to be all wet—whether they’ve seen it or not.

Block-of-gopher-wood-head Glenn Beck was one of those who wasn’t going to. On his radio show last week he said he wouldn’t give it the time of day, and he hoped others wouldn’t, either, especially kiddies, who might come away with a distorted picture of the truth.

“I haven’t seen it, nor will I,” Beck told his ten million faithful last Friday, “because it’s a slap in the face. Our children will look at that as being the Noah story, and…they will believe this version over the version that mommy and daddy are telling them, that the dusty old Bible is telling them.” Don’t want to mix up your fairy tales, in other words.

Beck reached his initial judgment just by reading a review of the movie. In his opinion, the story was “hostile to God.”

Who are we humans, indeed, to preempt God’s hostility?

Beck reconsidered over the weekend. He decided to go see the movie after all, in order to give it a fair viewing, and then, having seen it, he changed his stance. It wasn’t the “godless climate change movie” the review had made it sound like, but more like a “Babylonian Chainsaw Massacre,” with Noah “running around, not kidding, trying to kill his whole family.”

“I always thought of Noah as more of a nice, gentle guy,” Beck said, “and less of the homicidal maniac that Paramount found in the Bible.”

That’s the objection a lot of Christians will have to this fanciful take on the biblical story: In the original version, there’s only room for one homicidal maniac.

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As a longtime student of the world's religions, Paul feels qualified to criticize all of them. He is writing a book of essays titled Devout About Doubt. As an agnostic, Paul relishes Bertrand Russell's dictum about religious belief: "The ignorant are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt." Send Paul a message.

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